This weekend sees the release of the summer’s most unique yet raunchiest movie, a strongly R-rated animated comedy called “Sausage Party.” Let it be clear that this is absolutely not a movie that anyone under 17 should watch, and discerning Catholics above that age should steer clear as well.
The movie follows the adventures of a sausage named Frank (voiced by Seth Rogen, who also created the concept) who gleefully lives in a grocery store, dreaming of the day that he can get purchased and make it to the Great Beyond – the outside world. He and the rest of the store’s alive-and-talking groceries believe that they will enjoy a vibrant life of freedom on the outside, not knowing that in fact death by being eaten awaits.
He dreams of a relationship – well, lots of sex mixed in with a little romance – with a pretty hot dog bun voiced by Kristen Wiig. When the buns and the hot dogs wind up in the same shopping cart, they are excited that their dreams are about to become reality – until the shopping cart crashes into a door and they are bounced out onto the store floor along with most of the other items.
Forced out into the store aisles or escaping into the outside world on their own, the various groceries engage in a night-long battle to find out what really awaits them in the outside world, and to stay alive when an angry feminine-hygiene product goes on a rampage to kill the rest of them.
“Sausage Party” looks great and has a style that is truly unique to animated films, and its creation of a fully realized world inside the grocery store, in which the Chinese food plays into Chinese stereotypes and the Mexican food wears sombreros, and so on, is very funny and inventive. Rogen, who has in the past slipped conservative moral and political messages into some of his films under layers of raunch, is out to destroy PC limitations on comedy here and since every imaginable racial and ethnic group takes a comic hit, he gets away with it.
But unfortunately, the movie uses its animated status for an unbelievably gross and graphic array of sexual jokes, both verbal and visual. Add in wall to wall casual profanity of every strong stripe, and it’s definitely not a movie for anyone with moral concerns about their viewing.
Even worse, the entire movie is a thinly veiled endorsement of atheism and humanism, with the human “gods” that the groceries prayed to for freedom, and the Great Beyond of the outside world, both being proven false and scoffed at repeatedly. Any sense of faith is made to be a joke, and the message is to stop believing in any sort of a god and live in the now, for yourself. This unnecessary and callous stab at people of faith truly mars the movie beyond redemption, and is definitely NOT Dateworthy.
